San Diego Yarn Crawl 2013

The plan was to post last Sunday, but life (in the form of a car key lost down the toilet at De Anza Cove at 6:50 am just prior to an 8-mile racewalk workout, necessitating a long train ride home - after the eight miles - and a return trip to fetch the car with an actual key) got in the way.  Weeks right now are so crazed (in no small part because Older Daughter - at 15 still licenseless, but with her permit test scheduled for a week from tommorrow - is currently taking French two nights a week at the local community college, and is participating in a project to build and send a micro-lab to the International Space Station one night at week at UCSD; there is much driving these days), so there's no squeezing blog space out of the week.  And this weekend was San Diego's first Yarn Crawl!  

Unlike my friend Marie, I knew I wouldn't be able to visit all of the stores on the list, but we did manage to skip out early on Friday to make the 40+-mile drive to Ramona to go to an alpaca farm (you can't go wrong with alpaca, I say, even if you have to do some washboard dirt driving to get there).  

This guy had the best topknot ever.

And - to my very great excitement, the Yarnover Truck was there!

I was amazed at how much yarn they pack into such a small space (if you find them on FB or Instagram, they've got great photos).  And as you can see, they were totally accomodating about little things like trying the yarn on to see what colors are best (as my friend Marie is doing here).  Can you tell I look happy?

I got some lovely yarn there - two skeins of IndigoFirefly (in the colorway 20,000 Lawyers Under The Sea) to make the Side Impact Sweater, and one skein in the colorway Tardis to make socks for Dr. Who-obsessed Older Daughter (OK, I admit it, she's got me hooked, too - just made it through Season 1 of the most recent seasons, and now think Christopher Eccleston is even hotter than Daniel Craig).

The Side Impact Sweater is excitingly fabulous, and I have already swatched.

That's not the best representation of the color, which is more in the seafoam green range, but it has a lovely hand. I just need to decide which needle size I like best for it (the range there is from 6-4, top to bottom), and then do the math to make sure I choose the right size.

On Saturday, I wove for four hours at my very own LYS, Yarning For You, and got to talk to an amazing array of weavers and spinners, as well as knitters, from as far away as San Fernando - that's several hours of driving each way, for you non-SoCal folks.  Then Deb (YFY's fabulous owner) and I were sheep together.

Today was the last day, and on the way home from meeting up with the racewalking group for walking and kayaking (more on that momentarily), I swung by Black Sheep and Common Threads, both in Encinitas.  While I did get some yarn in both places (that's for another post), I also made a donation:

Those two bags have been sitting in my den since the Great Yarn Stash Toss of 2013, waiting for me to figure out where to donate them.  Black Sheep was collecting yarn for several charities, among them a shelter for women leaving violent situations, and that's where those two bags are going.

And then home again, to work on a project that I'd like to get off the needles before casting on any more (not least because I could use those size six needles).  And, less happily, to ice my calf, which I appear to have strained pretty badly.  Not walking, but (get this), by jogging to my car to grab something I'd forgotten before starting out.  Can you believe?  Going along, pushed off with my right foot to jump off the curb, and then, pop - and really not nice pain.  Sigh.  I got through the walk (slowly), and kayaking afterwards was fine, but I'm hurting pretty badly when I try to walk, so, as you can see, it's ice and elevation and knitting for me.

(That's the Jade Sapphire Sylph Cowl, out of Jade Sapphire Sylph - naturally.  Boring, but I think I'm going to like wearing it when it's done.)

So that's where my weekend went!  Next week (I hope), an update on Bohus knitting, which proceeds, and maybe some FOs.  I've also been hitting the trail, and admiring the sepia shades of fall - I probably won't be wallking much this week, but we'll see...

Coming off hiatus

Wow.  It's been almost exactly four months since I posted.  On the one hand, it feels like it's been forever, so four months makes sense; on the other hand, it just doesn't feel that long, somehow, probably because the time has been very full. 

To give you a brief idea.  We travelled.

Yes, that's looking across the Golden Horn to Sultanahmet.  In Istanbul.  Yes, we were in Turkey during the unrest.  No, we didn't run into any trouble.  Yes, we ended up driving down into the southeast of Turkey, into Mesopotamia (!!), to about fifty miles north of Syria (yes, driving in Turkey is quite an adventure).  No, still didn't run into any trouble.  Yes, it was an amazing experience.  Yes, I'll definitely write more about it in a post that isn't of the catch-up sort - it's worth some discussion.

The Blue Mosque. I absolutely fell in love with the muscular grace of mosque architecture.  There is something about the overlapping layers of domes that appeals to me deeply. 

We visited very old underground cities in Cappadocia (clearly people were not as tall as Rick back then; actually, in Turkey, they mostly still aren't).

And even older Neolithic ruins (that's Catal Huyuk, 10,000 years old); you could see the scorch marks from people's cooking fires.  That absolutely floored me.

Ephesus.  Where I had a revelation when it suddenly hit me who those Ephesians were that Paul was always writing to.  Dude.

We saw very old Turkish spindle whorls (these are from early Troy).

And less-old ones (this one's about fifty years old, and still in use, which is why it didn't come home with me).

We also went to Michigan, where we got to spend some wonderful time with family: my sister- and brother-in-law, and our niece.  I really treasure this time each summer that we've done it; I feel very lucky in my siblings-in-law.  This year, it was all about searching for waterfalls.

The cousins got to spend a lot of time together on the trail.

So did the grown-ups.

There was time for Uncle Geoff to try to teach the girls (and, I confess, me) how to skip stones.

And, you know, the family that goes into underground mines together, stays together!

My last trip took me to Seattle, where I got to spend the weekend with a fabulous group of women, including Erica, and Ellen and Jan (the others are, sadly, blogless, but no less wonderful and amazing and inspiring to me in so many ways), under the tutelage of Susanna Hansson, studying Bohus sweaters.  That, too, is fodder for another post (especially as I am now the proud owner of one of the three Bohus sweater kits that I would like to own, and am getting ready to cast on the yoke; you will undoubtedly hear more about that in the coming weeks and months - and, one fears, years - than you might like), but meanwhile, a taste:

(I fell in love with the one in the foreground there; alas that it is not available as a kit.)


I did knit, among all of that, mostly things which involved a lot of stockinette, and about which I will post next time.  I also came to realize that this seems to be a pattern with me - this avoidance of the computer and, largely, the interwebs, during the summer.  My watchword for this summer has been "mindfulness", for many reasons, and one of the things that I was trying to do was to be mindful of what was going on with me, vis-a-vis the computer.  I have come to realize that, as I am sure is true of many people, there are some things that I find it easier to be disciplined about than others.  Being an introvert, most of those things, for me, involve tasks that do not include engagement with other people.  For example, I can almost always, no matter how tired I am, make myself do background reading for articles I'm writing, or reading for prepping my classes.  I am pretty good, in the realm of knitting, at, say, starting second socks/mittens/sleeves.  I'm even not awful at plugging away at projects until they're finished. 

Among the things that require huge discipline for me to get to is the dreaded email.  I really, REALLY have a hard time with email (I'm even worse about answering the phone, though, and making return calls; I don't like the phone at all).  However, I have come to realize that letting my inbox pile up, especially during the school year, is just a recipe for a sick stomach and disaster.  Especially since becoming chair, I have had to be very disciplined about staying on top of email, about not shunting things I don't want to deal with to the bottom of the pile, never to emerge again - it just doesn't work out well if I want to get the job done with any modicum of success.  So I'm really (pretty) good about it during the year.  And then June comes, and the email rush becomes much less, and everyone knows that academics are "off" during the summer (hahahaha - note I did not list all the academic stuff I did in the last few months), so I kind of let it go, and I find that my natural aversion to the computer comes rising to the top again.

I really have a love/hate relationship with the internet.  On the hate side, it involves things like email (see above), and it really can be a huge time-suck.  I hate walking away from an hour in front of the screen, wondering where the heck the time went and what I had to show for it.  On the love side, I have some really good friends on the other side of that screen, whom I never would have met without being online, and I do miss them when I fall off the face of the internet.  This summer, I definitely erred on the side of falling off.  I think I got a lot of really important work done on and for myself as a result of it, but I also hope that people know that it isn't any kind of statement about how much I value the friendships whose interface is largely online.  I know that I need to find some kind of way to balance both the intensity of my screen time during the academic year (not helped right now by teaching my first-ever hybrid - half online, half in-person - class), and the total avoidance of it during my time off.

So that's it, in brief.  I do have knitting to show in my next post (one new sweater, the Northmavine hoody actually on my body, a wrap, and some socks, plus a few things in progress), and some spinning (my first ever gradient-roving yarn).  Horseback riding continues, and the chickens are (mostly) still with us.  Irish dance continues for Younger Daughter, and Older Daughter is getting ready to take the test for her driver's permit (how did that happen?).  Life continues.

Reboot

Thank you for all of the comments and feedback on my sweater conundrum.  My final conclusion was that the whole thing was trouble (very precise and technically-oriented, I know), so I ripped out both halves of the edging and started again.  Slowly.  I picked up for the outside facing, and then ran a lifeline through the stitches (which wasn't easy, as these are small stitches, knitted relatively tightly on small needles), so that I'd be able to find them again easily when I went back.  Then I knitted the front facing, put it evenly onto two needles (to keep from squishing all the stitches and making them unmanageable when I went back for the inside facing), and went back to pick up the purl bumps just above the legs of the original stitches (the legs being easy easier to spot now that they were on a lifeline).  That took eons, but it worked.  I should mention that there was also some very careful (and time-consuming) counting (and re-counting) of the 497 stitches on both sets of needles prior to the knitting of the inside facing.  Then I knitted them all together for the three needle bind-off.  That took the better part of all the knitting time I could devote to it last week (about 15 minutes to rip out everything I'd done, and then hours and hours - literally, though I wish I were exaggerating - to get it all done again).  I had that pretty much done by latelate Saturday night, when Older Daughter got home from this:

(Some of you may recognize the signs of prom.)  In fact, much of Saturday was spent on the getting-ready part of prom (getting nails done, for example).  There was even hair-doing.  I'm not much of a girl, really, and you've all seen how short my hair is these days, so that involved going out to actually purchase a hair-dryer and curling iron (!!).  I think Older Daughter was deeply concerned that the curling iron part of things might end up like this, but I finally let her know that I did, in fact, once upon a time own (and even use!) such a thing on myself, and it all turned out OK in the end.

Sunday morning (after coffee and croissants, my requested mother's day treat), Rick and I headed out (leaving prom-exhausted girls behind) to this:

The start of the Amgen Tour of California.  In downtown Escondido.  Where it topped 100 degrees before the race even started at 11:15.  After a quick lunch at home, we went out to the last King of the Mountain points banner to watch the riders come up their last big hill (they'd already climbed Mt. Palomar in the heat, poor guys); it was still over 100 degrees, under 25% humidity, and they looked pretty beat.  We stood in the shade and cheered (we even showed up on the TV coverage, heh).  I love a good stage race - we'll see how this one turns out.

Then home we went, where I finally (finally!!) picked up stitches around the bottom of the sweater, completed an i-cord cast-off around all of those stitches plus the ones still on the needles around the front and hood (it felt amazingly like a walk in the park after the facing debacle), and then did the same thing for the sleeves.  And wove in the ends.  And then this morning, knowing that we were in for another scorcher, I soaked and blocked the sweater before leaving for work.  The sweater is now, of course, quite dry.  All that remains is to put in the zipper.

(Bad picture, but it was that or nothing.)

That, my friends, is a sweater.  Ends woven in, i-cord edging complete.  Ends woven in (have I mentioned how many ends there were in this sweater?).  And double-sided front/hood edging?

Done.

At a total loss

I was going to write a post today about all of the projects that have required re-dos in the last week or so, with the good news that things generally seem to be back on track. But my mental composition came too soon, apparently.

I have been struggling with the finishing work on the Northmavine Hoody, which requires, let me tell you, a LOT of finishing work. Mostly, I have been doing it with good cheer. There was the hood, which required unkitchenering and further knitting (because it was too small), but I did that. And then there were the endless ends to be woven in (four for every eight rows of knitting for the entire sweater, arms, and hood), but last weekend I put many hours into that job and got it done. I kitchenered the underarms. I knitted the pockets. And then it was time to pick up stitches to knit the facing around the fronts and hood edges. I did that. All 500+ stitches, then six rows of knitting. So far so good.

Then it was time to turn to the wrong side and pick up stitches in the purl bumps left by the first round of pick-up-stitch. That was not easy. It was so not-easy, in fact, that I resorted to another option: I turned to the right side, picked up one leg of every knit stitch in the original pick-up row, and then turned everything back around and worked from there. That seemed to work, but knitting the five rows for the inside facing was fiddly, fiddly, fiddly. Partly because it's just long row after long row, and partly because each of those long rows had to be completed while working around the needle that was holding the front facing stitches. And (it must be admitted), partly because I was working with stitches squeezed tightly onto several shorter-than-optimal needles, because I just cannot see buying yet another pair of needles for this project, just to do this one thing (believe me when I say I have, one way or another, already bought an unconscionable number of needles for this project).

But I persevered. Through knitting the two facings, and then through the endless three-needle bind-off to attach them, leaving live stitches that now, in the almost-final stage of finishing, should be available for an i-cord bind-off. Except not.

Because something just is not right, and I haven't a clue why not, and I could really use some help here.

If you look at that first picture, you might be able to see what I'm talking about. See how the stitches look all lovely and straight on the left, and then start biasing increasingly as you go right? The biasing continues about halfway around, and then the stitches mysteriously line up neatly again.

The second photo shows the neatly lined up stitches. And the third, the neatly lined up inside facing stitches. But then, presto chango: bias.

And I don't know why. All the stitches were picked up the same way. And they line up, no biasing at all, along both fronts, biasing increasingly along the tops of the fronts and the hood. If I'd misaligned the stitches, I'd expect the biasing to continue all the way around once it starts, but it doesn't. At this point, the only option I can see is to rip this all out (a week of work!), and start again, but I hate to do that when I don't know what I did wrong in the first place - because how will I avoid doing it again? Any thoughts? I could use some advice here...

Paying attention

This is just a quick post (I think - who knows what'll happen once I start typing).  It's that time of year when things can start to feel sort of frayed and scattered.  And of course, what I'm feeling is nothing compared to what the people of Boston have been going through, or those in West (Texas).  Last week was a terrible week for so many people.  I spent a lot of last week having (as one might imagine) a lot of reactions to what felt like a deluge of around-the-clock bad news; I wasn't sure what to say about it, but it turns out I don't have to, because Erica wrote a post that really says everything I could have wanted to say, except more clearly.

I was feeling pretty frayed and scattered even before that, and I've been working pretty consistently on reminding myself to be here and now, not all the other places that my mind wants to go.  For me, the best way to remember that is to get my feet onto dirt.  So I've been trying to get myself (and Tilly - honestly, there is no better companion when seeking mindfulness than a dog; dogs definitely know how to stay in the moment) onto the trail at least a couple of times each week.  And my trails have certainly offered me a lot to pay attention to!  The weather has been a bit crazed.  Lots and lots of fog for a long time.

Is it just me, or does that look like Britain?  That's one of my favorite places to hike.  The other has been equally foggy - one morning it was so dense I couldn't see around the corner.  But I did get one moment of clearing.

It closed in again right away. 

The hillsides have shifted from purples and greens to reds.  The monkey flowers are out in full force.

And I've even found some Indian paintbrush (at least, I think that's what it is?  Willow?  Can you confirm?) in a drainage on the west side of the hill.

The sage will be out soon, bringing purple back to the color spectrum.  And I know that the blue-eyed grass is out, except not when I'm on the trail - at that time of the morning (and in the fog instead of sun), the flowers are shut up tight.

Knitting continues.  The sweater has grown large and unwieldy enough to make bad meeting knitting.  I thought I'd finished the hood, but when I tried it on, it was too small, so I picked out the kitchener stitching in the top and am adding some length.  I'm worried about the sleeves, as well, as they seem short to me (even though they're the same length as the body to the armscyes), but I'm going to finish up the zipper bands and icord trim and see how it fits with that added width in the body.  If that doesn't straighten out the fit of the sleeves, I'll snip out a stitch and add some length before grafting the cuffs back on (and thanks to Erica for that suggestion!).

It's gotten so big that I finally treated myself to a basket from the farmer's market (I've long been thinking about getting one for exactly this sort of large colorwork project that requires lots of balls of yarn to be carried around with the knitting at all times) so that I could have everything in one place.

See?  Perfect!

But, as I said, it does mean that this no longer makes good meeting knitting.  So I cast on for a pair of Lady Treymour socks (from Clara Parkes' Knitters Book of Socks).  Pictures of those next time, but I have to admit that the charm of knitting socks again (which I haven't done for some time) means that I haven't just been saving them for meetings - I need to start focusing on this sweater again if I want to finish it before I run out of fog.

The Easter bunny wears fur?

So, true story.  Friday night is pizza and movie night around here.  I was sitting on the couch, watching a movie with Rick and the girls, when I thought I dropped something.  I reached under the couch to see if I had, and came up with...an egg.  Which I found rather surprising, since we were in the den, and the chickens, so far as I know, do not come into the house to lay eggs.  I chalked it up to general weirdness and went on watching.  (Upon re-reading this prior to hitting publish, it occurs to me to wonder what that says about the general state of weirdness in our household.) 

The next morning, Rick came into the living room, holding up another egg.  He'd found it at the foot of the bed, on the floor.

I should be clear here - I'm talking about raw eggs.  Not hard-boiled eggs, not Easter eggs, not chocolate eggs (alas).  Chicken eggs, of the sort our chickens lay.

Fifteen minutes after Rick had announced his discovery, I heard dog paws clickety-clacketying down the hall, and then heard a rather hollow-sounding plonk at my side.  I looked down to see (you guessed it): an egg.  And a very pleased-looking Mathilda.  Who apparently is under the mistaken impression that she is the Easter bunny.

We haven't had any more special deliveries since then (although, given the under-the-couch egg, I am wondering where and in what state I will find other such "gifts" that I haven't noticed yet).  Our best guess is that some of the chickens have stopped laying in the coop (for a while, some of them were very attached to a nest on the side of the house, but then they all figured it out) because one of the chickens has gone broody, and persists in sitting in the nesting box all day, if allowed, making cranky noises at anyone who comes to bother her.  I'm guessing that the other hens find it easier to just lay elsewhere, and Tilly wanted to make sure that we weren't missing anything.  Never a dull moment around here!

In fiber-related news, I finished my first "real" weaving project.  Realizing that I don't wear long rectangular scarves, generally, I knew that I'd need to think of something else to focus my weaving attention on.  So I decided to try napkins. 

For a first-time experiment, they didn't turn out badly.  They are narrower than I'd hoped, as I warped the loom to an 90-inch warp (hoping to weave four 20-inch napkins that were 10 inches wide), using my new 10-dent heddle and a very nice linen warp (FibraNatura Flax).  Alas, the 250 meters that I had wasn't enough, so I ended up about an inch and a half shy of the width I'd wanted.

The weft yarn is Plymouth Grass (a 65% cotton/35% hemp yarn).  I tried a couple of new things on this project, for fun.  I hemstitched each end of the napkins as I came to them (a 2x2 hemstitch).

You can kind of see it there.  Now, I am not fond of fringes in my linens, so I trimmed two of the napkins off very close to the hemstitch (still need to do a bit more neatening up), and left two a bit longer, to see how they wear.  Any weavers out there want to tell me the best way to finish edges so that they look neat and have no fringe at all?

In the main part of each napkin, I started with leno (alternating 2x2)(you can see it more closely below), and then played around with weft floats using a pick-up stick for the rest of each napkin.

I finished them by washing and drying them.  They turned out, as I said, smaller than I'd wanted, but very absorbent and soft and cushy.  So I consider them to be a reasonable success for a first time out.

I immediately trucked off to my LYS to get more yarn for more napkins.  This time I ended up with a linen warp (Habu, L25/3 linen, 331 meters)(this is a finer-weight yarn than the FibraNatura, so we'll see how that works), and a blended warp (Plymouth Linen Concerto 48% rayon/42% linen/10% cotton; this is the yarn I used for the weft of the scarf that was my first project).

What you see there is the loom, dressed after two attempts.  The first time, thinking I'd have enough warp yarn for a longer warp, I went for it, only to find, about an inch and a half shy of my total 10-inch width, that I was out of warp yarn.  So I unwarped the loom, which, it turns out, was not as easy as I'd hoped.  I persevered, however, and rewarped it somewhat shorter, but all the way from one side to the other (hooray!).  I finished the warping and tying on this morning, so this is ready to go.

At the same time, I can't help but think of bigger projects, not to mention stash-busting projects (and more on me and my stash and our recent adventures in the next post).  I think that I want to weave the girls some blankets.  They will, of course, have to be woven in strips, but once I got the idea in my head, it wouldn't go away.  And then I remembered a skein of sock yarn that I got when I was in the Rockin' Sock Club a few years ago - a skein that is not at all my sort of colorway, but that Younger Daughter immediately laid claim to.  It's been waiting for the right time to get out of stash and into a project for her.

Talk about Easter egg colors!  Of course, that's not going to be enough for a blanket, but I also remembered four ounces of gorgeous Falkland fiber, hand-dyed by Erica, that I bought because the braid made me think of Younger Daughter (I now realize why).

Well, surely something can be done with that combination?  I'm thinking of using handspun yarn from that braid as the weft in the middle parts of the blanket, and the sock yarn for the weft at the edges.  But that leaves the warp.  Well, how about that yarn I bought to take the kilt hose class at Sock Summit, but which I haven't used?

Yup.  I think we've got something there.  I spent some time today thinking about maths.

Which rather made my head hurt.  I think I'll have enough of the two weft yarns, but will probably order one more skein of that sock yarn for the warp.  I have time, as I need to spin the Falkland up.  You can see there my sketch of my plan.  This'll be a twin bed size, so about 76" by 48".  I'm thinking three strips of a textured weave in the middle, and then four strips, arranged log cabin style, around the edges, woven in a colorwork pattern.  I have time to work out which while I get through my current napkin project and the kitchen towel project (planned to be a colorwork one) after that.  Once those are done, I think I'll be ready to tackle something bigger.

Meanwhile, I am plugging away at the Northmavine Hoody.  Whilst watching Paris-Roubaix this morning, I finished the second sleeve and got it onto the needle with the body stitches and the first sleeve, and am now working on the raglan decreases.  Little by little.  I keep reminding myself that this is not a project for the faint-of-heart.  Not only does it have lots of finishing details still to come (knitting ribbed bands along the fronts and then picking up and knitting an i-cord bind off all the way around the fronts, hood, and bottom of the sweater, then installing a zipper and knitting pockets), but the number of ends to be woven in are astronomical (four ends per every eight rows; I am not kidding).  I have been taking time at regular intervals to weave ends in so that they're not all waiting for me.  In fact, I believe that the second sleeve and its ends are calling me even as I type. 

So there's the question.  Do I weave?  Get that spinning started?  Weave in ends?  Fold laundry?

Well.  I think we know the answer to that last one.

A theme

I was taking pictures of various things I've been working on, and looking at pictures of some of the non-fiber pursuits I've been engaged in recently, and I think that there's a theme arising.  Let's see if you see it, too.

Maybe?

It's all purple and green around here, apparently.  I've been gazing out of my office window longingly these last few weeks, noting that the ceonothus are in bloom, but unable to get out there to enjoy them.  Last weekend, I took a nice long hike in the hills behind my house, and, as you can see from that top photo, they are blooming away.

And buzzing with bees.  Walking along the path bordered in these bushes is like walking through a giant beehive.  The bees are so focused on the flowers that they almost never actually fly into the path.  I went again this morning, much earlier in the day, and found that bees' alarm clocks must ring later than mine.  It was quiet on the way out, and I got up to the top of the hill to find a lovely view waiting for me.

Mist-covered hills and mountains stretching away to the east.  And back down again in time to catch the sun making it over the big hill I'd just climbed.

By the time I got back down, the bees were hard at work again.  I was relieved. 

There's also green and purple in the latest knitting I've been doing.

This is the body of the Northmavine Hoody, a Kate Davies pattern from her new book, Colours of Shetland, which I absolutely adore.  Totally aside from the patterns (there are quite a few in there that I'd knit), her writing is lovely, and she has essays about each of the places that inspired the patterns in the book.  It's truly a pleasure to read and look at.  The patterns are also well-thought-out, with the kinds of little details that I enjoy seeing in my knitwear - you can see the turned hem in the picture up top, and this pattern has several other details like that, the sort of thing that make it look professional when it's done - handmade, rather than homemade.  As you can see, I have finished the body, and tonight I will cast on for the first sleeve.  I'd love to finish this before the May Grey sets in around here - I think it could get some use.  It's knitted out of Jamieson and Smith 2-ply jumper weight, on size two needles, so it's a lovely weight, and a nice crunchy wool, in colors that I wear all the time (I admit to a total lack of originality on this one - I ordered the yarn used in the pattern, in the colours used in the pattern - but they are so me!).

And then some of you may have noticed that other picture I slipped in there.  What's that, you may ask?  That is the Cricket loom that my mom bought for me and the girls about a year and a half ago.  We wove the yarn included in the package, and then it rather languished.  When my LYS advertised a weaving class, using exactly this rigid heddle loom, I jumped at it.  So yesterday morning I went in and spent a lovely four hours at the store, re-learning how to dress the loom, and getting some good tips for using it.  When I got home, I spent a busy hour reclaiming my front and back patios from the chickens (have I mentioned that five chickens not only produce a good plenty of eggs, they also produce a good plenty of poop?), and trying to devise some way of arranging various patio furniture and cushions so that the chickens will not think that roosting on my patio furniture is a good thing.  (I'm also working on convincing them to return to their coop at night to roost.  They used to, until they discovered the couch on the front patio, so now they need retraining.  Any suggestions?)  Once that was done, I settled down on the back patio under the blooming wisteria (more purple and green, but no photos), listening to the bumblebees bumble about in the flowers, and weaving.  This morning, I wrapped the whole thing up, and got this.

I'm pretty happy with the final result, especially given that it's my first time out, really. 

The warp is a merino/cotton blend, in a solid seafoam green.  The weft is a linen/rayon/cotton blend, variegated (as you can see).  I finished it by washing it in my washer on the wool setting, and then chucking it in the dryer for a bit.  I wanted to soften the linen up, and figured that tightening up the wool a bit wouldn't be a bad thing, and I was right.  It is much more drapey now, and will probably continue to soften up with wear.  As I was weaving, I got curious as to how this would have turned out differently had I switched the warp and weft yarns, so as soon as I was done, I redressed the loom, using the linen/rayon/cotton blend for the warp.  I didn't have much yarn left - really, this second time around is more in the nature of an experiment, and good practice for locking down in my memory how to dress a loom - so this won't be a "real" scarf.  I also realized that the girls had "misplaced" several bits and bobs (read: the clamps for fixing the loom to the table, and the dent hook), but I managed just fine.

A heavy box pinned the loom in place and, in case anyone cares, an orifice hook works nicely as a dent hook.

As I said, this will be half the width of the first one, but I'm plugging along, and it's interesting to see how different the two yarns look when woven the other way around.

I know I'd said I wasn't going to get into weaving - too many fiber sports already.  But I figure a little bit couldn't hurt, right?  And it seems like a great way to start using more of my handspun, not to mention the rest of my stash.  In fact, to that end, I appear to have ordered another heddle, a ten-dent one this time (I don't think I'm quite using my vocabulary correctly; I'll get there), which is more appropriate to weaving the fingering weight yarn that makes up so much of my knitting and spinning stash.  I may also have ordered a stand for the loom and a book with some ideas for rigid heddle loom projects.

Oops.